A Canadian federal court has declined to review the asylum denial of Nigerian pastor Lucky Bidemi Olorunfemi, ruling his supporting documents contained evidence of fraud and bribery, infractions that paved the way for his deportation.
Justice McHaffie of the federal court in Toronto delivered the ruling on October 16, upholding a decision by the Refugee Protection Division that found Mr Olorunfemi’s materials lacked credibility and bore signs of being doctored.
Mr Olorunfemi, who claimed to be a pastor at a church in Akure, Ondo state, filed for refugee status in 2023 after relocating to Canada. He claimed that his pro-LGBTQ teachings and tolerance of gay congregants angered “Muslim Jihadis” who sought to take his life.
In one instance, he claimed irate Muslims torched his church and chased him to a police station in March 2022. According to Mr Olorunfemi, the incident led him to go into hiding for a year. It was from there that he processed his visa to flee to Canada.
To substantiate his claims, Mr Olorunfemi submitted four documents, but Mr McHaffie of the Canadian federal court questioned their authenticity, asserting they were riddled with errors and bore signs of fraud.
The Nigerian national was represented by Abdul-Rahman Kadiri in the matter heard in the Toronto court.
The documents include a newspaper excerpt reporting the attempt on Mr Olorunfemi’s life, an invitation from the Nigerian police to question him about the incident dated April 2022, his wife’s medical report following an attack in June 2024, and a wanted poster “Issued by the Authority of the Odoua [sic] Peoples Congress”.
But the Refugee Protection Division picked holes in the documents, particularly that the newspaper report was so poorly written and contained blunders that it resembled “brown paper journalism”. The judge noted that there was no direct link to the story, save for a generic website link.
Another red flag, the division noted, was that the wording of the newspaper report was almost verbatim as Mr Olorunfemi’s allegations.
“The RPD next set out why it considered it more likely than not that the newspaper report, which was ‘riddled with spelling and grammatical errors and recounts the claimant’s allegations using language obviously similar to that of his narrative,’ was an example of ‘brown envelope journalism,’ fabricated at Mr Olorunfemi’s direction. It made similar conclusions regarding the letter from the Nigeria Police Force, the medical report, and the wanted poster, each of which had glaring authenticity concerns,” the judge wrote in his ruling.
Mr McHaffie said the Nigerian pastor did not provide any credible reason to counter the RPD.
Also at issue was the wanted poster reportedly issued by “the Odoua [sic] Peoples Congress”. Several misspellings, including Oodua as “Odoua” and Yoruba as “youruba,” and other inconsistencies led the refugee division to further doubt the documents’ authenticity.
“This led the RPD to conclude that the poster was fraudulent even without having to note that the poster, which bears Mr Olorunfemi’s picture, identifies him as someone with a different name entirely,” stated Mr McHaffie.
Mr McHaffie stressed that Mr Olorunfemi’s wanted poster lacked any contact information, unlike similar letter specimens from the Nigerian police archived by the Canadian government. The judge countered Mr Olorunfemi’s assertions that the RPD denied his request on the basis of minor infractions, stressing that the Nigerian national had built his case on the documents and could not now turn around to label the discrepancies as minor.
He rebuked Mr Olorunfemi for faulting the RPD for not making further enquiries to verify the documents, when it was Mr Olorunfemi who submitted papers that lacked any contact details. The medical report, according to Mr McHaffie, only had a postal address and a Gmail address but no telephone number.
The court also noted contradictions in Mr Olorunfemi’s testimony, including his claim of limited English language proficiency, which was undermined when the division saw he “responded to his own counsel in flawless spoken English”.
After hearing Mr Olorunfemi’s arguments, Mr McHaffie sided with the RPD that while Mr Olorunfemi’s arguments were not credible, the only fact that could be established in his case was that he was truly a Nigerian “based on his passport and testimony”.
The judge dismissed Mr Olorunfemi’s request for a review of his asylum denial due to his failure to remain consistent in his testimony and to buttress his application with credible documents.
“The application for judicial review is dismissed,” the judge ruled.
